Meg and Linus Blog Tour: Importance of LGBTQIAP+ Rep. for Teens

Can friendship, Star Trek, drama club, and a whole lot of coffee get two nerdy best friends through the beginning of their senior year of high school?

Meg and Linus are best friends bound by a shared love of school, a coffee obsession, and being queer. It’s not always easy to be the nerdy lesbian or gay kid in a suburban town. But they have each other. And a few Star Trek boxed sets. They’re pretty happy.

But then Sophia, Meg’s longtime girlfriend, breaks up with Meg. Linus starts tutoring the totally dreamy new kid, Danny—and Meg thinks setting them up is the perfect project to distract herself from her own heartbreak. But Linus isn’t so sure Danny even likes guys, and maybe Sophia isn’t quite as out of the picture as Meg thought she was. . . .

From crowdsourced young adult imprint Swoon Reads comes Meg & Linus by Hanna Nowinski, a fun friendship story about two quirky teens who must learn to get out of their comfort zones and take risks—even if that means joining the drama club, making new friends, and learning how to stand on your own.

Hanna Nowinski is a language enthusiast and trained translator for German and English who lives in the middle of nowhere, Germany. She has wanted to be a writer since she learned that books were made by real people. As a kid, she made up her own bedtime stories, mostly sending her stuffed animals on adventures around the world. She loves books, music, coffee, and getting way too emotionally invested in TV shows. Meg & Linus is her debut novel.

Representation is important in so many different ways that sometimes it’s hard to even find a place to start.

Everyone deserves to have fictional characters they can identify with. Finding parts of yourself in a fictional character is a great feeling. It lets you know that you’re not the only one, and it can inspire you, too.

Related to that is the fact that LGBTQIAP+ teens often face challenges that other teens don’t. Very often they have to deal with living in an environment that’s not accepting of them. While that’s not so much the case in Meg & Linus, it is very important that we talk about that and make people aware of it, because you can only start fixing a problem once you acknowledge its existence.

But one thing that’s very important to me is simply making LGBTQIAP+ teens visible and to get to a point where their numbers in books, TV shows, and movies equal their numbers in real life. It’s still incredibly difficult to find representation anywhere. The sad truth is that the vast majority of stories out there doesn’t even feature a single LGBTQIAP+ teen. And that is utterly unrealistic. It doesn’t represent the real world at all. What’s more, it makes LGBTQIAP+ teens who consume those stories feel like aliens, like their existence is unusual and not worth mentioning. That has to change.

If we can get to a place where books with LGBTQIAP+ characters are no longer specifically FOR LGBTQIAP+ people, that would be absolutely awesome, too. If LGBTQIAP+ teens (and adults) can consume stories with straight characters and identify with them, why shouldn’t it work the other way around?

Life, feelings, hopes and dreams work the same way for LGBTQIAP+ teens and adults as they work for everyone else on the planet. And the only way we can make this into a normal thing in people’s heads is by representing them in the same way straight people are represented. That’s what I tried to do with Meg & Linus. The existence of LGBTQIAP+ teens needs to be acknowledged and normalized. Way more than it is today.

We all need to learn that there is no such thing as normal. There are just different ways to be. Teens need to feel like they belong, like they have a place in the world. And seeing people like themselves in books and on TV is a huge step in that direction.

This book is important for our times, for sure! I love the whole concept of this one and I must admit that I am not a big Star Trek fan. However, I think that the themes and the diverse nature of this book make it one that I should add to my TBR asap. Thanks for sharing it! :)

I'm also not a big Star Trek fan (though to be honest, I never fully watched it so who knows?). The themes in this book though I think are very important for our community and in general. Thanks for stopping by!

I absolutely loved this guest post...this is such an important book for teens (and adults) in today's society, and the guest post hit several crucial points. Definitely going to add this one to my to read list and pick up a copy when I get the chance! Thanks so much for sharing!

Oh I loved this guest post so much!! I totally agree and wish more books/media would acknowledge this and start working harder at it. Plus I absolutely can't wait to read this book, it sounds so amazing, eeeep!!

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